Happy Days: not what I expected

I have vague memories of watching Happy Days as a kid — I suppose around the later 1970s to early 1980s, which means it would have been during its original run. I recall it as a frivolous show, a series of undemanding, jocular set-pieces playing on the humour of the Fonz’s being so much cooler than everyone else, almost to the point of it being a superpower.

I’ve recently been watching it from the start. It’s not what I expected at all.

For one thing, the whole tone of the show is very different from what I remembered. It’s a rather earnest look at the real issues faced by an older teenager in the 1950s, including sex and drugs. It’s pitched as a comedy, but it’s very rarely funny — I laugh maybe once an episode and grin one or two times more. The laugh track doesn’t help at all — it’s very haphazard, with the most mundane lines inexplicably picked out as meriting a laugh that comes out of nowhere.

Instead, the show is touching.

In particular, there’s something rather lovely about how consistently understanding and insightful Ritchie Cunningham’s dad, Howard, is. In a show that was played for laughs, he’d be comically furious with Ritchie’s escapades, which are not trivial. In the first seven episodes he lies about having gone further with a girl than he did, wastes all his savings on a useless car, gets drunk at a stag party, gets involved with an illegal drag race, breaks the glass in the door of his father’s hardware store, takes a series of idiot dares as a gang hazing, and is accused (albeit wrongfully) of helping a friend cheat in school. Only once is Howard visibly angry (after the drag-racing episode, which involved him as well as Ritchie being picked up by the police), and even then his punishment — he’s grounded for two weeks — is temperate, even lenient. Howard comes across as a very sympathetic and understanding human, not at all like a sitcom father.

But the real surprise is the Fonz, who is rather a pathetic figure. He’s a high-school dropout who all the other kids think is cool because he works as a mechanic. But the show knows that in ten years when the other kids all have good jobs, Fonzie’s still going to be doing the same things he’s doing now, in a state of arrested development, an increasingly sad man trying to recapture the glories of his early days. Part of what’s appealing about the show is how he’s portrayed, somewhat subtly, as knowing this himself — hence the seventh episode where he briefly tries to drop back into high-school. (He is the friend who Ritchie almost helps to cheat.)

Some aspects of the show have not aged well, though it’s not clear whether they reflect the 1950s setting or the 1970s production. For example, one of the hazing dares that Ritchie and his friend Potsie take in the sixth episode is to forcibly kiss a waitress, who is clearly very distressed by the experience. Potsie goes ahead with it even having seen how she reacted to Ritchie — in effect this is a minor sexual assault, but it’s played for laughs. We’re supposed to find it funny how distressed the waitress is. Instead, we find it uncomfortable and out of character.

Still, that’s an aberration in a show that generally has its heart in the right place. I’m enjoying it enough that I’ll certainly finish the first series and make a start on the second. After that, we’ll see.

7 responses to “Happy Days: not what I expected”

interesting post. I would have expected to view it today in the same way as I did when I was a kid so maybe I should also revisit it.
Certainly I know that I look at Dads Army now very differently now from when I first saw it, certainly the earlier episodes at least. On the surface, and with a child’s eyes you tend on concentrate on the slapstick and farce, but looking at it again I see how much there is of camaraderie and bonding, even amongst characters given to bickering between themselves. Mainwaring for all his pomposity and bluster will literally die for his troops as when they draw straws to decide who will defuse a bomb and he cheats to make sure he is selected or when they prepare to make a last stand during an apparent invasion and they know that they aren’t going to repel the Germans but are only there to hold them long enough for the regular army to arrive but they are still going to stand and fight anyway. And I still get something in my eye in the episode where Godfrey is revealed to have been a conscientious objector in WW1 and hence is shunned as a coward, but then they discover he had won a Military Medal for working as a stretcher bearer.
They say you can’t go back to old telly or you’ll always be disappointed but that’s not always the case

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